Time's Arrow, Part II

The story that began with Jean-Luc Picard finding Data's detached head in a cavern near San Francisco reaches its conclusion in the concluding episode. Some aliens from the planet Davidia have been using earth as a feeding ground and the eating seems to be good around San Francisco bay.

It's quite an adventure and part of the reason is that one of the most intellectually curious people in the history Samuel Langhorne Clemens or better known as Mark Twain overhears Data and Guinan conversing and knows this is important though he reaches the wrong conclusion.

Of course the Enterprise crew defeats the aliens and time resumes its normal course. Jerry Hardin does a wonderful job as Mark Twain. You really think it is Twain.

Sad to say though that most pessimistic of men never changed his attitude despite the glimpse into the distant future that he got in this episode. It was more than a glimpse, it was a grand tour courtesy of Counselor Troi.

Still seeing Jerry Hardin as Twain makes this TNG story worth a watch.

The conclusion to the previous time travel episode.

This is an enjoyable finish to a pretty good story.

I prefer the cleverness of the story detail to the character moments. It does not generate much in the way of suspense or tension, as the pacing of the key plot details are quite slow. However when the situation is resolved I look back upon it as a cool time temporal concept that uses the passing time of time to great effect.

The characters are pretty good though, especially Captain Picard, Data, Guinan, Samuel Clements, and Jack London. How much the historical characters actually add to the episode other than padding that makes it all feel very literate and high-brow, is a matter of debate.

Patrick Stewart and Caryn Johnson are both great. Jerry Hardin is entertaining, but his voice starts to get a bit tiresome to me by the end, especially if you watch episodes parts 1 and 2 back to back. I do though like his observations on the idealistic Trek future society.

Riker and the others are fairly good also. The scenes when everyone pretends to be part of a theatrical troupe to humour a nosey landlady reminds me a lot of "The Ladykillers".

Visually it all work very well with some cool effects, set design, props, and costuming.

Apart from the poor sit-com with the landlady, this was good, if contrived, fun. Those who complained about Samuel Clemens voice/accent have clearly not done their homework. He did make audio recordings (on wax cylinders) but none are known to have survived.) However, the actor William Gillette (best know as the first to play Sherlock Holmes) knew Clemens and used to impersonations of him on stage. He recorded at least one and it sounds like what we hear here.

After arguably STNG's finest episode "The Inner Light", this two-parter continues the excellence, marred only by the performance of Hardin, an otherwise fine actor. His exaggerated Samuel Clemens, with its irritating, grinding old miner inflections and affectations, had me muting his portions after awhile. Too bad, because this episode is so cleverly written and so well performed, it is a flaw that should have been fixed. Otherwise I would have given this 9 stars.

In part one, Data was beamed back to San Francisco in 1893 and he cannot get back to the Enterprise. But the crew are able to come up with some confusing way to join Data and they learn about the weird creatures that have come to Earth's past to kill people and harvest the energy in the victims' brains and spinal columns. Naturally they have to stop this as well as all return to the present. There is a slight glitch, however, as Mark Twain (yes, THAT Mark Twain) learns about their plans and threatens the timeline because of this.

I enjoyed part one more than part two simply because I didn't love the Mark Twain angle and I also thought the character was a bit too hammy. He wasn't terrible--I just didn't like this in the story. Worth seeing, however.